Underwater Surface Material

I. Snell's Window Table of Contents: I. The Underwater Surface, Snell's Window
 c. Caustics b. Volumetric Fog III. Creating the Underwater View
 ← Previous a. Boss Ocean Surface

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When viewing the waters surface from below (when the viewer or camera is in the water),
The surface is made up of two parts, the visible world above the waters surface, and the reflection of the environment below the waters surface.
The area of the surface in which the world above water is visible is called Snell's Window.
On a calm day, when the water is flat, Snell's Window appears as a circle.

This tutorial is focused on replicating Snell's Window, which is primarily a material related technique.
Any other topics covered in this tutorial are included to help complete the appearance of an underwater environment.
Things like Boss, Volumetric Fog, and lighting are larger topics that won't be covered in depth here. UNDERWATER SURFACE Tutorial II. Required Materials II. Required Materials To follow along with this tutorial you will need the following:

    a. Autodesk Maya

    b. Redshift 3d

    c. an HDRI - this tutorial uses this one, which is free:
    https://hdri-skies.com/free-hdris/hdr-map-757/

    d. Animated caustics textures - this tutorial uses one created by this free software:
    https://www.cathalmcnally.com/news/free-caustics-generator/

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Next → Suggestions for further refinement:     1. Creating a more realistic animated Caustics texture

    2. Break up the volumetric fog to be less uniform using a 3d noise.

    3. Add particulate in the water using nParticles, instanced meshes, or adding them in compositing.

    4. Add bubbles (the material for the ocean would do just fine for this use).

    5. Bake out the Boss solvers to vector displacement maps.